Can you Keir the people sing?

The press plaudits for Labour's national anthem stunt won't last long.

On 28 June 1894, 5 days after the birth of future short-term king and long-term fascism fan Edward VIII, Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to object to the humble address celebrating the event. His request that a note expressing condolences after the deaths of 250 men and boys at Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd be added had been denied. He said:

We are asked to rejoice because this child has been born and that one day he will be called upon to rule over this great Empire. Up to the present time, we have no means of knowing what his qualifications or fitness for that task may be…

… From his childhood onwards this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon someday to reign over.

In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world… and at the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill…

The government will not find an opportunity for a vote of condolence with the relatives of those who are lying stiff and stark in a Welsh valley, and, if that cannot be done, the motion before the House ought never to have been proposed either.

On 25 September 2022, 17 days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Keir Starmer rose at the Labour Party conference to open the event with a tribute:

… the Late Queen Elizabeth II was this great country’s greatest monarch. She created a special, personal relationship with all of us. A relationship based on service and devotion to our country. Even now, after the mourning period has passed it still feels impossible to imagine a Britain without her.

Hardly any of us have ever known anything else. For us, the Late Queen has always been simply the Queen, the only Queen. Above all else, our Queen. And I am proud to lead our party’s tribute to her today.

… as we enter a new era, lets commit to honouring the late Queen’s memory. Let’s turn our collar up and face the storm, keep alive the spirit of public service she embodied and let it drive us towards a better future.

For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth II stood as head of our country. But, in spirit, she stood amongst us.

The sycophants and flatterers that Hardie talked about are leading the Labour Party, and following their minute’s silence with a rousing chorus of God Save The King.

It was the first time in the Labour Party’s history that the national anthem had been sung at its conference and the decision was press released in advance. Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Levelling Up Secretary, appeared on The Daily Telegraph’s ‘Chopper’s Politics’ podcast to tell Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope — the paper’s chief royal yacht restoration obsessive — that:

I’ve never understood how sections of the Left can believe that somehow being proud of your country is not a Labour tradition. Being part of something bigger than yourself by the strength of our common endeavour – we achieve more than we do alone. That is the core of our message

In 2020, while standing for the Labour leadership, Nandy answered a question on how she’d vote in a referendum on the monarchy by saying:

I’m a democrat, so I would vote to scrap it…

The Nandy of the present day must be awfully confused by the naive 41-year-old Nandy of two years ago, who was so unacceptably unpatriotic.

The argument for Labour’s ‘patriotic’ party conference prologue is that it must make itself seem loyal again after the traitorous reign of Jeremy Corbyn. Most articles refer to his attendance at a Battle of Britain memorial service in 2015 when he stood in respectful silence rather than singing the anthem.

At the time, The New Statesman published an article by Dr Oskar Cox Jensen, a fellow in the department of music at Kings College, London, which argued that By refusing to sing the national anthem, Jeremy Corbyn joins a long tradition of respectful opposition. Now, its deputy political editor, Rachel Wearmouth, writes:

A minute’s silence was strictly observed by delegates and applause followed the singing of the national anthem, with no boos or heckles. It demonstrated not only respect for the Queen among Labour members but loyalty to Starmer – something he could not have hoped for 12 months ago.

No Labour member can have doubted Corbyn’s view. In an interview with the BBC before the conference the former leader described the plan for the tribute as “very, very odd” and “excessively nationalist”. That members chose not to take his cue underlines, perhaps, a growing hunger for power. Lack of patriotism was a criticism repeatedly levelled at Corbyn’s Labour, particularly among Brexit voters in the Red Wall. Starmer cannot win the general election due in 2024 without convincing those voters that Labour has changed.

The enhanced “loyalty to Starmer” surely has nothing to do with the expulsion of hundreds of members nor the heavy manners put around before the event about what behaviour would be tolerated. With so much talk of Blairite nostalgia perhaps some older attendees recalled how 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang was forcibly ejected in 2005 for heckling Jack Straw.

“Lack of patriotism was a criticism repeatedly levelled at Corbyn’s Labour” is one of those classic press phrases that omits to mention who was doing all that levelling. Wearmouth’s phrasing — one shared by The Daily Mail (“Jeremy Corbyn blasts Keir Starmer’s plan…”) and The Daily Express (“Corbyn hits out at Starmer…”) — also ignores that Corbyn simply answered a question put to him by Nick Robinson:

Robinson: What do you think about the idea of singing ‘God Save The King’ at the start of the Labour conference?

Corbyn: Very odd. Very, very odd. It’s never happened at a Labour Conference. The conference is there, hopefully, for a democratic expression of party members’ views. We don’t, as a country, routinely go around singing the national anthem at every single event we go to. We don’t sing it in schools, we don’t have the raising of the flag in schools, as they do in the USA and other places. We are not that sort of, what I call, excessively nationalist and I don’t see the need for it.

The counter-argument comes from commentators like the Bureau of Investigative Journalists’ James Ball who tweeted:

Singing the anthem at party conference means any patriotism-type questions Labour MPs face for the next few years can be answered with “Of course, we’re not ashamed of Britain, we sang the national anthem at our party conference.”

The notion here — a frankly ludicrous one — is that the guns of the right-wing papers can be spiked by the gesture, that wrapping Keir Starmer in so many Union Flags that he resembles a mummied member of a long-lost Britpop band will act as armour.

The Daily Telegraph, for which Starmer wrote a simpering article in June (“It’s your ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee”), illustrates how naive that is; its sketchwriter, builderphobic bowtie enthusiast Tim Stanley, laughs at the obvious hollowness of the stunt:

… if the Tories have been captured by libertarians, Labour is suddenly under the thumb of the moderates - and in the tradition of all great dictatorships, compliance is enforced with public ritual.

You will sing the national anthem. Or, rather, "You vill be patriotic!"

His repeated references to “the Politburo” and observation that “like clapping for Stalin, no one wants to be the first to stop mourning” are less dog whistles and more klaxons to his ear-trumpet clasping audience: Do not be fooled, these reds aren’t really moved by the royals.

But, as the old sex shop adage has it, a stopped cock is right twice a day, and it’s hard to disagree with Stanley when he writes:

The only hitch is that in a bid to offend no one, Labour has nothing to say. There’s a Last Night of the Proms where a conference should be. Labour could’ve saved us all a lot of time and money by broadcasting a montage of Elizabeth II launching ships with Angela Rayner singing You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.

While Labour is trying the National Anthem, the Telegraph is singing another old song; its leader column accuses Starmer of “adopting the politics of envy” and snarls:

What people want is a fairer share of the cake, said Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary yesterday. Actually, what people want is a bigger cake

Stanley does the harmonies:

The Tories want a bigger cake; Labour would divide a diminishing sponge, till it is redistributing crumbs.

A news story headlined Labour Party conference app uses controversial republican term ‘north of Ireland’ shows how the magic anthem will not stop the papers from doing what they do worst.

“But that’s the Telegraph, we can never expect to get them onside,” Labour might argue — ignoring its desperate interviews, op-ed contributions, and painful podcast appearances — and point instead to the fact that The Daily Mail — yes, The Daily Mail — gave it good press for the anthem performance.

Online, the Mail ran a lengthy report headlined Labour Party conference opens with the National Anthem for the first time EVER as Keir Starmer leads tribute to the Queen including a minute's silence and there is NO booing (despite Jeremy Corbyn moaning). In print, the event received a small box out on a double-page spread headline Labour turmoil over income tax.

While both the online and print coverage said “the anthem and the silence were flawlessly observed”, the Mail led — as The Spectator did — with the fact that “delegates were helped out with the words printed on cards”, noted the absence of union ‘bosses’ and grumbled about Labour For A Republic’s fringe meeting.

In a separate story, Andrew Pierce claimed:

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer reacted with visible relief when there were no jeers or boos as the Party faithful sang the national anthem at the opening of their annual conference in Liverpool yesterday.

For this outbreak of decorum, he may well have to thank the leadership of Labour For A Republic, the official party grouping that campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy.

Mindful of heightened sensitivities following the death of the Queen, it has warned supporters not to make any incendiary comments about the Royal Family.

'Never refer, even jokingly, to Charles I's beheading as a solution, or to how Russia dealt with the Tsars,' it said in a document issued to members and intended to be used as a guide to conduct during local Labour Party meetings.

The Times’ analysis — jointly bylined to Matt Chorley, Henry Zeffman and Patrick Maguire — opens with a blunt statement on the anthem stunt:

… there was relief when the Liverpool hall stood in sombre silence to pay respects to the Queen, before singing the national anthem for the first time at a Labour conference. “If you want proof the Labour Party has changed, that tribute to the Queen was it,” one senior insider said. “What a moment.”

The Labour Right are like bad magicians; they can’t do a trick without boasting about how they did it to their favourite audience, lobby correspondents.

The same line (“If you want proof the Labour party has changed, that tribute to the Queen was it…”) was given to Jessica Elgot at The Guardian, no doubt by the same “senior aide”. The paper’s chief political correspondent used it in the opening of her article Left is marginalised as Starmer allies dominate at Labour conference.

In it, the shrinking of the party membership and almost total squashing of debate are treated as simply just how things are:

Since he took over, about 200,000 members have left the party. Starmer’s allies now hold almost all the levers of power, a majority on the governing national executive committee, and have won most parliamentary selection battles – including some in which more leftwing candidates were suspended for controversial reasons.

Those “controversial reasons” go unexplored as the British press leaves it to Qatar-funded Al Jazeera and ‘The Labour Files’ to explore those issues.

The desperation in Starmer’s Labour to seem adequately patriotic and keen on the King is ultimately just another throwback to the Blair era. In 1996, when the Fabian Society published a pamphlet that proposed the abolition of the Civil List, transferring the powers of Royal Prerogative to the Speaker of the Commons, and new anthems for England and Wales, Labour panicked.

A senior source told The Independent:

The idea that we might change the role and status of the Queen and the National Anthem is complete madness.

Tony Blair has consistently expressed his great support for the fine job done by the Queen. There is no prospect whatever of a Labour government seeking to alter the political role or the status of the Queen in any way.

The content of this pamphlet which is in no way a Labour Party document will not have any effect on Labour Party policy and the suggestion that the national anthem should be changed is sheer fantasy.

It’s 26 years later and the song remains the same.

Keir Starmer is like Captain Black in Catch 22:

[He] replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them… The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was…

“The important thing is to keep them pledging,” he explained to his cohorts. “It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what “pledge” and “allegiance” mean.

His hope is that he can kid the media and electorate that performance is enough; that the scoundrel’s last refuge can be refurbished and sold in a thousand social media clips of such disciplined singing.

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